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Ray crawled in the darkness until he found the keys and then he climbed up Leonard.

“Thank you Leonard. You’re not quick but when you put your mind to shit, shit gets done. Now, you wait right here, Leonard, okay?”

Ray backed slowly and clumsily down the hall, subtly entreating Leonard not to follow. He backed through the swinging doors and may have detected a confused sadness on Leonard’s face as he let them close behind him.

Once through the doors Ray saw that night was falling. As unwelcoming as Los Angeles was certain to be with its population of millions of primitive beings, it would only be worse after dark. He determined to escape the hospital and the city before then.

As he sifted through the keys Ray looked back to make sure that Leonard wasn’t following. Doubtless he’d assume leadership of the tribe and impose a benign rule and eventually find the cafeteria. As he looked Ray’s eyes settled momentarily on the door to the office of Dr. Spivic.

The office of Dr. Spivic was large and luxurious and in the main a model of an organized mind. It had windows to the exterior on the wall facing the door and a trim carpet and the
few surfaces that could be seen behind hundreds of books were a refreshing, plain white. On the wall to Ray’s right was a single swinging door with another portal window and to his left was a busy desk scattered with what looked like furiously competing works in progress.

Ray took a seat in the modest swivel chair behind the desk and pushed the papers about idly. Exhaustion and agony competing with curiosity, he hoped that something obvious would appear with a title like “The Cure” or “The Last Eight Hours Helpfully Explained, With Illustrations”.

And it did. Ray shifted some clinical forms with dosages and frequencies to reveal an open file folder with notes in a trained, scholarly hand in which he saw his own name.

“...sometimes difficult to keep in mind Ray’s extraordinary capacity for spontaneous invention. The patient claims to no longer recognize the step-father’s photograph or those of any other victims but Ray has made similar claims in the past in an effort to shorten the treatment.

However the current scans of this and other patients indicate that the progressively increased dosage is simultaneously effective and necessary. Speculation is that a form of scar tissue on the cortex is building as a natural response to the neurotoxins, resulting in an effective immunity to the radiation and requiring stronger doses with each treatment.

It’s worth noting a possible correlation between this unexpected side-effect and the mass memory-loss phenomena accompanying the solar flares. Radiated neurotoxins could theoretically act as a functional vaccine against the sun’s radiation with a limited but unpredictable effect on long-term memory. There’s little time for further study but even if this is so it would mean that as long as the solar flares last communities at risk will have to receive continuously increasing doses. The logistics for an area even the size of the Oahu Beach site are mind-boggling.

I’ve raised this issue with the symposium and the consensus is that the situation is dire enough to try at least a focused trial but the challenge at the moment is determining the location of the next flares. The best analysis at the moment suggests that the flares have settled into a 24 hour cycle and that the next large area to be affected would be affected again within the day but by then, of course, it would be too late.

Our best lead at the moment is Ray, who’s scheduled to return to the federal penitentiary to continue serving the initial sentence now that the treatment trial period has officially ended, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be allowed time for further study in light of the public health emergency.”

Ray was unsurprised to discover that he was a mental patient but he was a little shaken by the news that he was at one point a homicidal maniac. He genuinely had no memory of a stepfather or “other victims” and he resented slightly being cured of an illness that might have been of tremendous use when his face was being pounded against a tile floor.

But if Dr. Spivic’s speculation was close to correct then the treatment that expunged whatever traumatic memories had turned Ray into a killer had also hardened his brain against the effects of the solar radiation. He’d lost his worst long-term memories to save the rest and that would be a fair deal were it not for the total breakdown of society. At least he wouldn’t be going back to prison.

And now it was all going to happen again in, possibly, a few hours when the sun came up. The entirety of Los Angeles had been affected, possibly the entire state of California and, for all Ray knew, the entire planet was at that moment remaking scattered caveman societies only to have them all wiped blank again the next day. Worse again, from Ray’s perspective at least and he had a hard time caring about any other, was this indefinitely increasing dosage that had been necessary to make Ray receptive enough to finally put his rocky past behind him.

Ray needed another dose. A stronger one, apparently, whatever that might mean, and he didn’t even know what a dose looked like. He pulled the laboratory documents back into view and was disheartened by a complete lack of context. Radiated benign neurotoxins, it turns out, are complex, unstable and hard to come by even with all the advantages of a functioning society.

The only hope was a prepared dosage. If such a thing existed Ray could last another day, possibly long enough to get to safety or obtain a degree in advanced pharmaceutical chemistry. There were no medicines of any kind in the office. Ray looked then to the remaining door and saw in the window another a face looking back at him.

The door pushed open and a middle-aged man stepped into the office and stood looking at Ray in a manner that suggested that introductions would be unnecessary. Beneath his otherwise pristine white lab coat the man’s shoulder had been bleeding much as it would had he barely escaped a fight with a homicidal maniac. He looked directly in Ray’s eyes as no one had done in his short memory.

“Dr. Spivic? Are you in there?” Ray said. “I’m guessing that I did that to you and I think you know that I’m very sorry if I did. That was before I was cured, you see. I know that I apparently lie about these things but I swear I have no memory of whatever happened between us.”

Dr. Spivic didn’t answer. He held his hands to his sides like a gunfighter and Ray saw then in each he had a long hypodermic like the one last seen in Leonard. And neatly threaded into the front of his coat were a dozen more hypodermics, like the bullet-belt of a Mexican revolutionary. He began to approach Ray.

“I don’t suppose that’s the next dose is it?” Ray asked. He eyed the door and considered making a run for it but was unwilling to abandon the promise behind the very last door. Dr. Spivic seemed to understand Ray’s dilemma and he may have betrayed the slightest smile.

The doctor had lost some blood but so had Ray and Ray was suffering a broken nose, fat lips, a general beating and he was covered in tar. Also the doctor was armed. Ray weighed the odds, gathered his remaining strength, and ran out the door.

Ray waited at the double swinging doors back into the now pitch-black hall of rubber rooms. The doctor exited the office in his gunfighter stance and moved with the slow confidence of a hunter who believes that he has all the time he needs to track a single wounded target. Ray disappeared into the hall where he hoped his loyal bodyguard was still waiting.

The emergency lighting was completely gone now and the hall could have been filled with Leonards for all Ray could see. He moved to the next doors and waited until he saw the doctor follow him into the darkness.

Outside the doors there was just enough ambient light to show no sign of Leonard. Doubtless he was with his new friends. Ray stepped into the first treatment room and stood in the shadows and waited. He heard Doctor Spivic leave the dark hall and walk in what seemed like a direct line to Ray’s hiding place. Ray took a deep breath and held it in an effort to slow down his heart to roughly the rate of some furniture. The steps continued to approach and Ray could see the edge of a shadow outside the door.

At that moment a grunt of contentment issued from the common area. It was the happy sound of a tribe of hungry amnesiacs who’ve discovered a cafeteria full of food and it was just enough to attract Dr. Spivic, who moved away from Ray’s door and down the hall. Ray allowed himself a single breath. As the steps faded to silence he returned to breathing almost normally but still didn’t move, preferring to give Leonard whatever time he needed to deal with the enemy.

Minutes passed with no sound and Ray relaxed just enough to take a small step onto broken glass. Ray was in the same room in which he’d discovered consciousness and he’d stepped on the shards with a crackle that sounded in Ray’s state like a crystal decanter thrown against a marble wall. The steps started coming back.

But there was more than one set of steps. Leonard had killed or possibly befriended Dr. Spivic and they were coming back to offer him some of the bounty from the cafeteria. And sure enough Ray’s massive silhouette appeared at the door.

“Leonard” Ray whispered, but only because he was hoarse from holding his breath. Leonard looked at him but didn’t see him because where his eyes had been were the hubs of two massive hypodermic needles. Leonard reached out for Ray or for comfort or support but found none before crashing to the floor at Ray’s feet. Behind him was Dr. Spivic, re-armed and smiling that evasive, unreadable smile. He stepped over Leonard and into the darkness.

Ray covered his face in time to sacrifice his forearm for his eyes as two needles plunged into him. He pulled his arm away before the needles could be removed for reuse and felt them break off under his skin. He put the other arm up but this time the needles sank into his stomach, were pulled out again and stabbed into his thighs. Ray thrashed like a blind man fighting off a swarm of bees.

When his left hand found the sink Ray held out his right arm as bait and it was quickly accepted. Needles sunk into his arm and he found the doctor’s neck with his hand. Thus guided in the darkness Ray positioned the needle he’d pulled from Leonard’s hand on Dr. Spivic’s neck and pushed, changed direction enough to pin the trachea to the esophagus, and threaded the needle through so that it came out into his hand.

The assault stopped immediately. Ray held the hypodermic in place, anchored in his own hand, and waited while the doctor drowned. It took a nauseatingly long time.

The room was indeed a clinical laboratory. There Ray found disinfectants and bandages and tiny pliers that seemed disturbingly well-suited to the task of removing hypodermic needles broken off under the skin. He cleaned off as much blood as would come off and changed into hospital scrubs and a laboratory coat and began investigating his new working environment.

The room was lit by exterior windows and the fading evening sun. There were storage cabinets built onto the walls above a neatly organized countertop of beakers and boxes and medical instruments. The remaining wall at the far end had only an open and empty safe built into it. In the middle of the room was a working surface with sinks and nothing else but a single sheet of paper with a note written in the same clean academic hand in which Ray had learned of his criminal past.

I am Doctor Thomas Spivic, head of neuropsychology at this hospital. It’s likely that I’ve isolated a vaccine to the solar flare radiation that’s wiping the memories of entire populations.

I’ve only been able to prepare a very small amount and I’m going to have to administer it to myself. I regret what appears to be an act of wholesale ego but if there’s going to be a broader vaccine then I’m the only one who can produce it. I don’t know what my mental state will be so I’ve prepared a limited number of doses with written instructions on their application. To prevent their use by anyone but myself I’ve locked them in the safe in this laboratory and written the combination on my arm.

At first there was nothing but road and only time and space for the road rushing forward like a slamming door. And then in the same instant there were cars and trucks and lamp posts and people and noise and no more space for road in the dense obstacle course and the realization that she was part of the chaos with her foot flat on the accelerator and hand on the steering wheel and less than no time at all to react.

She geared straight from fourth to first and swerved onto the sidewalk around a growing wall of wreckage pulling cars to it like a magnet. Then she was back on the road and accelerating through the impossibly thin slice of space and time between an oncoming tour bus and the wreckage before threading through out-of-control cars in the wrong lane.

Then her feet were on the clutch and the brakes and she was turning hard into a tight spin and abrupt stop neatly tucked into the jackknife of an articulated semi-trailer. And then all was silence and settling dust and bewilderment. She had been newly born behind the wheel of a fast car at the center of an enormous traffic accident and she didn’t know who she was or how she got there or how she’d survived.

Her harbor of refuge in the angle of the transport trailers was entirely surrounded by a doomscape skyline of wrecked cars piled two and three high with spinning tires and knocking engines. The little red sports car to
whom she owed her life, and vice-versa, was entombed. She turned off the ignition and looked for clues to any of the countless mysteries.

On the passenger seat was a lacquered wicker hand bag and in it she found a phone. She dialed 911 to hear a recording telling her that she needed to wait and that her emergency was very important and would be dealt with shortly. She didn’t believe that so she hung up and scrolled through the contacts, recognizing no one until she found “Dad” to whom, she reasoned, she was related. But Dad wasn’t available and she felt unqualified to leave a message. There was a wallet in the purse with a California driver’s license. She was Honor Lee, she was 28 years old and pretty with black hair and sharp oriental eyes, she lived in Beverly Hills, and she was legally entitled to drive a car.

Doubtless someone else will have called emergency services and there’d be sirens soon and when the more dire physical injuries and death had been addressed she could ask someone to take her to a hospital. Then she’d have to convince a doctor that her amnesia was unrelated to the traffic accident, that she was aware of everything seconds before it happened and nothing else at all, everything else was a complete blank. Honor left the security of the car.

As she opened the door the heat poured in like liquid and she knew that the wreckage must be on fire. There was no safe path between the cars so she climbed onto the hood of a sport utility vehicle. A man behind the wheel appeared to be either in shock or irrationally absorbed by whatever was on the radio. She stepped up onto the roof and saw that she was at an intersection of two downtown city streets which she recognized as somewhere in Hollywood. In four directions for as far as she could see — which is a long way in the flat, low-rise expanse of downtown Los Angeles — was calm and quiet chaos. It was the biggest pile-up she could remember but, of course, it was also the smallest.

There was no fire. The oppressive heat was in the air and it was coming from everywhere and it lay like a resin over the city. It only added to the desert, frontier-town atmosphere, soundless and immobile and indifferent, as though Honor was entirely alone in a city of 13 million people. There were no sirens. There was little sound at all apart from idling engines and dripping fuel and the occasional clunk of vehicles settling into their correct level between wreckage and road. The people in cars remained in their cars and those on the sidewalk stood still and silent and stupefied, uninterested in the spectacular city-wide collision that had just transformed their streets.

Honor slid down the side of the jeep and onto the bed of a pickup truck and then hopped onto the sidewalk. She looked into the eyes of the bystanders and none of them looked back. They looked simultaneously disengaged and distressed, like they’d been asked to explain an impenetrable piece of abstract art.

She looked for anyone who might still be plugged in and chose a man with a briefcase in his hand and a phone to his ear and said “Are you talking to someone? Are you calling 911?” He didn’t look at her or react in any way so she took the phone from him.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said to no reply. She dropped the phone in her purse and tested the man’s resolution to remain dumb by reaching into his inside jacket pocket and taking his wallet. She was momentarily but thoroughly terrified when he looked her square in the eye but his expression didn’t change and he continued holding his hand to his face and struggling with the puzzle of the unseen artwork. The moment passed and Honor took what cash there was in the wallet and put it back where she found it.

“Thanks” she said. “I’ll pay you back when I see you. Promise”. He didn’t appear to mind. Nor did the dozens of witnesses and Honor looked around at them and involuntarily giggled something between anxiety and elation. She was in a crowd of people but it was as though she was invisible. She was the only conscious person on the street, in the city, maybe even on the planet, and she was seized by a deep and broadening craving to take advantage of the situation.

She took an apple from the shopping bag of a woman in line at a bus stop and a watch off the wrist of a tourist with suitcases in his hands. She continued along the sidewalk in this fashion, helping herself to a sun hat and a pair of sunglasses and so much cash that she stopped counting and then found her attention seized by much greater opportunity. She was standing at the entrance to a luxury car rental dealership.

Honor recognized the cars only and intimately the moment she saw them as she staggered through the lot like an Idaho tourist on Fifth Avenue. She settled immediately on a green convertible Jaguar XK but then rejected it because it was green and next to a white 1969 Mustang fastback with chrome trim and hood-mounted air intake. Then she knew she had to have the new model matte black Corvette with racing options but it turned out to have an automatic transmission so she moved on to the orange Maserati Gran Turismo before spotting her new ride, a red Ferrari 458 with a seven-speed gearbox and rear-mounted V8 engine and a top speed of over 200 mph. She went into the rental office to make arrangements.

For a dealer in luxury automobiles the office was distinctly modest and would have been if it traded in used gardening tools. It was a single-story concrete-block garage with a plate-glass office added during an economic downturn. Inside the office the one wall which wasn’t window was asymmetrically decorated with posters of fast cars on mountain roads. There was a single filing cabinet and a desk behind which sat a tanned, chisel-faced mannequin of a man in an Armani suit and a state of complete detachment. His finger was coiled into the handle of a chipped coffee mug and he watched the smoke rise from a cigar in an ashtray set in the center of a little tire on his desk.

“Hi.” Honor said. “I’ll take the red one, please.”

The mannequin just watched the smoke as though it really needed watching and Honor looked about for car keys. There was nothing on the desk but the ashtray and a stack of rental contracts bound with over-used paper clips. The filing cabinet was locked so she slipped a paper clip off one of the contracts and straightened it out and fit it gently into the keyhole, angled it down, then up again and then down and to the right and the lock popped out of the drawer. Inside were plastic folders with owner’s manuals, trinkets, maps and keys and each had a little tab indicating the car to which it belonged.

The Ferrari fit like it had been built around her, as would be expected of a car that costs roughly the same as a nice house near good schools. The engine growled like a grizzly bear announcing happy news over a megaphone and grew exponentially louder with the slightest touch of the accelerator and Honor trilled an anticipatory giggle. She tapped into second gear, brought the bear up to a modest 3000 of the available 9000 RPMs, and released the clutch. The car slithered out of the parking lot and onto the sidewalk of Santa Monica Boulevard.

Honor turned north at the first opportunity, drawn by what she assumed would be less cluttered plains upon which to set the Ferrari free. She turned again when the sidewalk disappeared and found herself having to slow to slip between the tourists stood like chess pieces on the slippery tiles of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. When the crowd thinned she brought the car very near its top speed before power sliding onto the ample middle turning lane of North Highland in time to avoid the palm trees that seemed to grow in an instant out of the sidewalk.

The middle lane was relatively clear and she raced up the slight incline in fifth gear. The carnage was less dense and dramatic here and most cars had merely bumped into one another and were waiting to run out of gas while their occupants waited for nothing at all.

Honor continued to climb the hill and select more and more secluded roads until she found herself on a perfect country surface with no cars or pedestrians and thick forest on either side. She was finally going 200 mph and only slowing slightly to take the sharp turns as though on a tether. Then she knew where she was. With no memory of having been there, Honor recognized this ideal countryside road as the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens and the high wire fence as the back of the North America reserve.

The crossroads at the top of the hill was blocked by a 60 ton bulldozer with a deep concave universal blade and ripper attachment on the back, so new that the tracks still reflected the sun. Thirteen feet high and banana yellow and wrapped around at least 450 horsepower, it made a Ferrari feel fragile and frail and wholly inadequate, like an origami tiger. Whatever its other strengths, no Ferrari was going to knock a hole in the elephant enclosure.

Starting a newer model bulldozer is much like starting a new car or a truck, if you have the keys, and even more so if you don’t. Honor prised loose the dashboard with the Ferrari key and stripped the ignition wires with a pair of nail clippers. On the first touch the machine barked once before settling into a solid rumble like it was chuckling in anticipation of what it and Honor were about to do together.

The main path split into a service road at the crossroads and the road was closed by a chain-link gate and a sign, “zoo staff only”. Honor raised the shovel and released the clutch and dragged the fence down the service road until the exterior wall of the gorilla enclosure was in view. At that point the rock and adobe wall is perhaps twenty feet high so she knew to raise the blade as high as it would go and approach only as fast as first gear would allow, which is roughly the walking speed of an old man looking for an address.

The bulldozer was stopped by a brief test of strength between machine and wall which machine soon won. The top half of the wall tumbled into the shovel and the bulldozer climbed over the remaining rubble and into the gorilla reserve. The gorillas seemed surprised to see her and responded as gorillas always will when confronted with a bulldozer, which is largely indistinguishable from their response to the sudden appearance of any heavy construction machinery. She waved them an emotional goodbye as she flattened the gate to the public area of the zoo.

Honor pulled the front off the orangutan's tree house pavilion and drove through the front and out the back of the elephant enclosure. The lion watched his front doors bend in with a lethargic confidence, as though it was an expected development of passing interest, which he would address later. In fact few of the animals took immediate advantage of their freedom as Honor pushed in the bars of the leopard cage and tipped a palm tree into the tiger’s deep pen, forming a convenient gangway.

Honor was on top of the world. No one tried to stop her, no one seemed to see her or the massive bulldozer she was riding as she released or tried to release the giraffes, the rhinoceros and the chimpanzees, who provided the greatest satisfaction as they immediately seized the opportunity to mingle with the tourists and occupy the food concessions.

A large-scale zoo escape is hot, heavy work on the best of days and today was hotter and heavier than most. So after collapsing the wall of the aviary to release a squawking cloud of exotic birds Honor turned off the engine and listened to the jungle cacophony she’d created. Tired and dusty and thirsty but filled with the elation of a job well done, she hopped off the bulldozer and took a bottle of water from a peanut vendor who seemed to be just at that moment becoming distantly aware that he was covered in monkeys.

Honor drank deeply and when she lowered the bottle she was looking upon the rule of unintended consequences. An elegant Sumatran Tiger was stalking a motionless herd of Japanese tourists with soft and silent and wholly unnecessary stealth. Honor scouted the exits, spotted the parking lot, and escaped the zoo. She had no memory of having had to deal with consequences but she felt certain that she didn’t like them, and in any case she was bored now and anxious to find another way to profit from her position as the only conscious person alive.